I am quite sure that many of us are well acquainted with the fact that heat happens to be one of the main methods used to generate electrical power, but have you actually looked at your body heat being used to indulge in a useful endeavor? Professor Jo Byeong-jin of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) figures that it would be good to tap into one’s body heat as a power source to juice up our every power hungry gadgets that we tote around these days, ranging from smartphones to tablets and the like.
Just how is Prof. Jo going to get the job done? Well, he has managed to come up with a new kind of thermo-element in order to perform this task in a more efficient manner. Apparently, a small four-inch strip is capable of delivering enough power to turn on a microchip, which is far from actually powering a smartphone, but at least it is a start. Perhaps a size in the region of 10 x 40 inches would fare much better with a smartphone in tow, so imagine implementing such thermo-elements into a shirt or pair of pants.
Dr. Jo hopes that the future will see devices that have no need for batteries, since they can be powered directly from the thermal element itself. What do you think of this? [Press Release]
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